The Only Girl in the Game (32 page)

“Told me
what
?”

“I don’t know nothing specific, but it’s an old pattern. That Max Hanes, he got something on her, some kind of proof of something she did. I’d figure he trapped her, the way men like that trap women, and after he had it to hold over her, then he could make her do things that would help him in a business way. I guess the son of a bitch is smart enough so he saw she was too valuable a piece to use real often, but when he had some big money reason why she should hop into bed with somebody important enough, he had her set up so all he had to do was say Hop!

“When they trapped her, that’s what got her so low down I took her out to the desert place, having to take the chance she’d kill herself out there, but knowing her only chance in God’s world was finding the strength inside herself to endure. She didn’t tell me right out, but from the way she said she was free now her father was dead, it would have been something Hanes could send or show to her father. That’s something a loving daughter can’t let happen. After she’d done Max’s little favor for him, she’d come here to me. She would hardly talk about it, but I could guess all of it. Once she was pretty bad beat by some foreigner he gave her to.”

“But why would he do that?”

“Come now! You’ve been in Vegas the best part of a year. You blind and deaf too? Business reasons, boy. Big gambling reasons.”

“Would you know … when the last time was that Max … used her?”

“Oh, that was a long time back. I told you it wasn’t often. Before you came to town, even. Way last summer sometime. I don’t hardly think she could get up out of your bed and git into another one and come right on back to you, smiling and happy. She’s a decent woman, and that kind of trick would just be plain beyond her.”

“That vile son of a bitch!”

Mrs. Huss chuckled. “Why sure he is! And he’s proud of it. It helps in the kind of job he’s got. Pretty women and big money—the world has a habit of working one against the other, and it’s the woman seems to take the loss. So I guess if you had known all this, you wouldn’t even have took the trouble coming here asking an old woman about her, would you?”

“I can’t live in a world as empty as the world has been for the last six weeks. That’s all I know.”

“You mean that?”

“With all my heart.”

She gave a snort of derision. “Mister, if what you’re saying wasn’t just a mess of empty words, you wouldn’t even be here. You’d be with her, wherever she is. Being with her would mean more to you than the fancy job you’ve got.”

“I’d made my decision to chuck the job and go after her, Mrs. Huss. But I found out that isn’t so easy.”

“Why not?”

He told her all he had learned from the lawyer, James Wray. Mabel Huss listened carefully, interrupting him with questions from time to time.

“Lord, I don’t like the sound of it. I don’t like the sound of it at
all
, mister. What’s your name? Hugh? I’m calling you Hugh and you’re calling me Mabel on account of we’re the only two friends she’s got in this town. Oh, there were hundreds liked her to pieces, but friends is a different word.”

“So she didn’t stay here with you that last night.”

“I got her call saying good-bye and that was the last I heard.”

“Do you think she stayed at your place in the desert?”

“I think she would have said she was going to if.… Say! I remember now she did say she was mailing the keys back to me. And I never got them and never thought about it until this very minute. She said she hoped I’d forgive her for not bringing them by, but she had so much to do in the morning cleaning up all her affairs, she felt she wouldn’t have much time to spare.”

“The bank, getting rid of the car, those are the things she was going to do. But something stopped her, Mabel.”

“So why didn’t she get to the funeral, and even if she didn’t, why hasn’t she come back and taken care of those things she left undone?”

“I don’t know. I wish I knew.”

“And if she’d gone out to the place, she’d have gone in that little car, and that lawyer from San Francisco said it’s sitting at the airport right where she left it?”

“That’s right. But I think I’ll go out there and take a look around tomorrow, if you don’t mind, and if you’ve got a key I could take.”

“I’ll give you one when you go, Hugh. This thing is going to worry me right out of my mind, wondering about her. I know in my bones that little lawyer man is right. If nothing bad had happened to her, she would have wrote me at least a postcard, because she’s thoughtful that way. She’s … me all over again, the way I was shaming myself and no way out of it at all, being bounced on those old iron beds in every crummy hotel from Akron to Atlantic City, just for the chance to walk on stage in sequins and hand some half-drunk magician his goddam top hat and trick cane for money they either didn’t pay or borrowed back. It’s a life to turn your heart to stone. But at the end I found me a man and, slow and easy, he brought me back to life again, so everything that came ahead of him was just a bad dream that almost hadn’t happened at all.”

He took the key with him when he left, and early the next afternoon he drove out to the little stone lodge in the
desert. The silence and the emptiness of the place depressed him. He could see Betty all too clearly, every move and pose and expression, and far beyond the silences he could hear the cadence of her voice. Here love had reached its first inevitable completion, and it had been so much more than either of them had expected.

There was too much of her here, too personal, too specific, too memorable. He saw no sign that she had stopped there the last night, but if she had she would have left it as she found it.

He drove too fast when he left, punishing his car on the rough road. He left the key with Mabel and told her he had found nothing.

When he was back in his office he knew what he would have to do. He could not know whether it would work. But he knew he had to do it.

• • •  twelve

A large hotel is, in its most significant sense, an intricate functioning relationship of hundreds of human beings. The staff world is entirely apart from the world inhabited by the guests. Hotel workers are a special breed. They soon learn devious arts. If the most cretinous transient operator of one of the dishwashing machines cashes out a two-dollar bet on a long shot, the spinster housekeeper in charge of the fourth floor will know it ten minutes later. The day following the rabbit test, the most elderly gardener will know that the young wife of the second pastry chef is pregnant.

Hugh Darren was the son of hotel workers. He had been raised in that special atmosphere. And he knew that the competent hotel manager ignores such trivial things except when they threaten to affect the operation of the hotel. He felt a contempt for those managers who developed and carefully maintained an espionage network, using whatever unsavory bits they picked up as blackmail weapons not only to control the staff but, in many instances, to set up kickback procedures on both wages and purchases. In such hotels the guest sees the effect of bad management without knowing the cause—surly personnel, dirt, indifference.

But now he knew his personal reasons were strong enough
so that he would take the risk of destroying, without giving it a second thought, the smooth operation he had built up.

He knew that, fragmented among the memories of the hundreds of employees, was, if it could be assembled, all parts of the story of what happened on the night of April twenty-eighth, as well as all parts of the two-year story of how Hanes had blackmailed Betty Dawson. Only through force, fear and coercion could he assemble that random factual material into one complete picture.

He began on Tuesday afternoon, the last day of May.

He called George Ladori into his office, and spoke to him privately. “George, I’m making a few policy changes. From now on your recommendation for hiring and firing of your personnel will not be automatic. I’ll review every case personally.”

“What if you keep somebody on I don’t want in my department?”

“Then you’ll have to make up your own mind whether to quit or stay on, won’t you?”

Ladori stared out from under heavy brows. “Who’s giving you orders to do this? You know better. The hotel runs smooth, now you bitch it up.”

“In addition, George, I’ll reserve the right to raise the pay of any person in your department without reference to you.”

“So what happens to the fancy budget system we got, huh?”

“You’ll keep it in line.”

“Cut quality?”

“That’s your problem.”

Ladori stood up. “It was nice while it lasted, Darren. Now it’s the same old crap like other places. Who scared you?”

“That’s all for now, George. When I want to see you again, I’ll let you know.”

“Make it a long time.”

He gave the same orders to John Trabe, in charge of liquor, to Walter Welch, in charge of maintenance, to Byron “Bunny” Rice, his night man, and to his office manager. It created a new wariness in every one of them, and he sensed that the good relationships had been destroyed, perhaps beyond rebuilding.

And then it was necessary merely to sit back and wait.

The first customer was one of the maids. She had been employed for just four mouths. The housekeeper on her floor suspected the woman of petty theft. Guests had complained
about small mysterious disappearances. The problem was brought to Hugh. With the cooperation of a guest, they set a trap for her, a stack of seven fifty-dollar chips on a dressing table. After the woman cleaned the room there were six. One of the two security officers who worked under Darren brought the woman to his office. After vehement denials that grew constantly weaker, she produced the pre-marked chip from her brassiere, flung it onto Hugh’s desk and collapsed into angry tears.

Hugh typed out a confession. The maid signed it. Hugh and the security officer witnessed it. Just as he dismissed the security officer, Jane Sanderson came in and went to her desk, frankly curious. Hugh took the maid to the small conference room off the office and closed the door. The woman’s name was Mary Michin. She had a weak, dull face.

When she was under control he said, “It isn’t just petty theft, Mary. It’s fifty dollars. You know that. I can push it, and the least you’ll get is six months. I could promise you that. Six months.”

After he waited out the new storm of weeping, he said, “But I might not do it if I get a few solemn promises from you, with the understanding that the first time you fail to keep them, I throw you to the cops.” She bobbed her head eagerly. “Without telling a soul about this, Mary, you will dig up every scrap of information you can about Betty Dawson, who left here six weeks ago. You will report everything to me you can learn. I want every scrap of gossip about her and what could have happened to her. Do you understand? Good. Also, I want gossip about staff people who may be in some kind of trouble—money trouble, marriage trouble. Don’t try to get in touch with me with any of this. Every once in a while, when I make my rounds, I’ll find you and you’ll have a chance to tell me these things. Keep your ears open. Ask questions. And if you can’t get any information for me, Mary, I’ll take this confession out of my personal private file and make sure you go to jail. Is that clear?”

After he had dismissed the browbeaten woman, he felt soiled and brutal. But he knew he was proceeding in the only possible way. In similar ways, with equivalent threats, he acquired the ears and memory of an electrician on the maintenance staff, a waitress in the coffee shop, a fat and greedy bellhop. Through their whispered disclosures of intrigue between other members of the staff he was able to acquire a bartender, a solarium attendant, a young gardener, a swimming-pool guard. He brought a cold and relentless
pressure down upon them, using their own fear and greed and insecurity to whip them into a great diligence of espionage.

As, piece by piece, a horrid picture began to form, he could not permit himself to realize that he was getting this information about the woman he loved. He had to steel himself to a special objectivity. The full emotional significance was there, like a presence a half step behind him, but he could not let himself turn and look into its face, because he sensed that it would break him.

He noted down each significant fragment, and as the picture began to form it provided clues to the areas where he should intensify the pressure.

At five o’clock on the fifteenth day of June, a Wednesday, Jane Sanderson marched to his desk, sat in the chair, looked at him with anger and curiosity and said, “Don’t you think it’s about time you told me what the hell you’re doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, so bland and so innocent! For God’s sake, Hugh, in two lousy weeks you’ve turned this whole place into a ferment of fear and confusion. Ladori is quietly job-hunting. People were in danger of liking you so much they tried to do their best for you. But all of a sudden you don’t give a damn about performance. People are scared of you. You have pets. So we’re getting guest complaints by the bale.”

“Jane, honestly, I can’t tell you what I’m doing or why I’m doing it. There’s only one thing I can tell you. It won’t last much longer.”

“Do you realize how long it will take to undo what you’re doing?”

“A long time.”

“In another month we’ll be right back where we started.”

“I know that too.”

“But
why
are you doing this?”

“The reason is important.”

She sighed. “I give up. Some day, let me in on these things, huh?”

That same evening he sat at the small desk in his room on the second floor and carefully wrote out, in no special order, a series of statements. Though he had no proof of any of them, he believed them to be true.

1. There exists somewhere, away from the hotel, a special place to which big winners are enticed for purposes of blackmail.

2. Betty assisted Hanes in such projects.

3. Hanes, with Marta’s knowledge and approval, had and
perhaps still has unsavory still pictures or tapes or movies proving Betty’s complicity in this blackmail operation.